What one startup founder learned from building a company in an unproven market

When I started Search Engine People (SEP) Inc. in the basement of my home in 2001, I made the decision not to seek investors, because the online marketing space was new and unproven. Instead, I committed to drawing on savings, cutting back on expenses and getting things going. After that first year, I began to pay myself just enough to cover basic household costs, and reinvested the rest back into the company. After another six months, I was able to hire someone part-time, and at two years I hired my first full-time employee. Now, SEP has more than 100 employees and upward of 1,000 clients worldwide, including many of Canada’s top brands.

The following are some of the lessons I learned from those early days:

Carve out your niche Early on I realized I had to distinguish my company from the competition. In 2003, Quipp Internet Marketing Solutions (QIMS) became Search Engine People Inc. Everyone in this space was working out of their basement and I wanted people to see SEP differently. I routed calls through a service so that every one got answered personally and it worked — larger companies were drawn to what they thought was a larger company.

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Focus on what you’re good at My first purchase was HTML for Dummies. I taught myself code and started to implement some of the solutions. But I soon realized it took me far too long, so I hired someone with coding expertise. My second hire was also a coder. At that time, the industry primarily consisted of coders, but lacked business skills. Bringing in people with the technical know-how left me time to focus on sales and business strategy. Even though hiring people cost money it created growth because I had the right people doing the right jobs. Trying to wear all hats doesn’t help growth or finances.

Build evolution and change into your culture No one could imagine how quickly the online space would evolve and change. When I started the company, every four to six weeks we would sit on the edge of ours seats waiting to see Google’s latest update of their algorithm. After an update in 2003 caused companies to go out of business, we began to study how each update affected clients and our service offering.

We decided to focus on more long-term strategies. It was a tremendous shift in the business model — we were building evolution and change into the very fabric of the company. Now, Google changes their algorithm more than 550 times a year, which would be a tremendous risk to a company that focused solely on SEO. The reality was we could affect Google’s results, but not control them. As a result, a big part of our role with clients has become helping them evolve their businesses to capture new opportunities and to adapt to the new realities of marketing.

SEP is again evolving, to become a developer of technologies that will help clients more efficiently and effectively market themselves online. Status quo is not an option. In essence, all companies have three options: don’t evolve and fade into obscurity; evolve by reacting to industry changes, and eke out a difficult living; or define the future by being one of the companies to develop it. I choose the third option, and I’d like to help others get there, too.